subject: 9 Business Website Mistakes To Avoid At All Costs! [print this page] If you have a website for your business then you already know the importance of traffic. Traffic is as important to your website as physical location is to your business itself. Traffic is the only thing that really matters. If you cannot generate targeted visitors to your site, you will not make any sales.
Usually the owner or designer of the website is the person designated to drive traffic to the site. The chief ingredient in generating traffic is the search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing. Of course, you can use advertising, but it's going to cost you. Using the search engines to generate targeted (interested in your product) traffic is the least expensive method known.
Unfortunately, many website owners do not understand the importance of search engine optimisation, which is needed to get a website placed highly in the search engines.. They place more importance on producing a "pretty" website. Not that this is bad, but it is really secondary to search engine placement.
Hopefully, the following list of common mistakes, made by many website owners, will help you stop making the mistakes yourself and help you to generate more targeted traffic to your business website...after all, isn't that what you want?
Here are the 9 mistakes...
1. Not using keywords effectively.
This is probably one of the most critical areas of site design. Choose the right keywords and potential customers will find your site. Use the wrong ones and your site will see little, if any, traffic.
2. Repeating the same keywords.
When you use the same keywords over and over again (called keyword stuffing) the search engines may downgrade (or skip) the page or site.
3. Robbing pages from other websites.
How many times have you heard or read that "this is the Internet and it's ok to steal images and text from websites to use on your site". Don't do it. It's one thing to learn from others who have been there and another to copy their work outright. The search engines are very smart and usually detect page duplication. They may even prevent you from ever being listed by them.
4. Using keywords that are not related to your website.
Many unethical website owners try to gain search engine visibility by using keywords that have nothing at all to do with their website. They place unrelated keywords in a page (such as "sex", the name of a known celebrity, the hot search topic of the day, etc.) inside a meta tag for a page. The keyword doesn't have anything to do with the page topic. However, since the keyword is popular, they think this will boost their visibility. This technique is considered spam by the search engines and may cause the page (or sometimes the whole site) to be removed from the search engine listing.
5. Relying on hidden text.
You might be inclined to think that if you cannot see it, it doesn't hurt. Wrong.... Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them invisible. For example, some unethical designers may set the keywords to the same colour as the background of the web page; thereby, making it invisible.
6. Relying on tiny text.
This is another version of the item above (relying on hidden text). Do not try to hide your keywords or keyword phrases by making them tiny. Setting the text size of the keywords so small that it can barely be seen does this and is again frowned upon by the search engines.
7. Assuming all search engines are the same.
Many people assume that each search engine plays by the same rules. This is not so. Each has their own rule base and is subject to change anytime they so desire. Make it a point to learn what each major search engine requires for high visibility and for best optimisation in that search engine. If you only have limited time though, always aim to rank highly in Google first as this is by far the biggest search engine and will bring you the highest number of visitors if you can rank well
8. Using free web hosting.
Do not use free web hosting if you are really serious about increasing site traffic via search engine optimisation. Many times the search engines will eliminate content from these free hosts.
9. Forgetting to check for missing web page elements.
Make sure to check every page in your website is complete and doesn't have missing links or missing graphics, etc. There are sites on the web that will do this for free.
These are just a few common mistakes that you should be careful to avoid. Do not give in to the temptation that these methods will work for you. They will do more harm than good for your website.
Not only will you spend weeks of wasted effort, but the worst case scenario is that you may have your site banned from the search engines forever. Invest a little time to learn the proper techniques for improving the search engine optimisation of your business website and your traffic... as well as your profits, will increase.
